Yesterday, Governor Charlie Baker defended the state’s vaccine distribution plan in front of Beacon Hill lawmakers, facing questions about the shaky rollout of the vaccine appointment website and hotline. Co-hosts of The Scrum podcast Peter Kadzis, GBH News senior editor, and Adam Reilly, GBH News political reporter, joined host Joe Mathieu on Morning Edition today to break down what the unusually tense scene might mean for the governor's political future and the state’s pandemic recovery.
Although the session remained civil, the pointed critiques were a departure from how Democrats on Beacon Hill have treated Republican Baker over the course of his two terms in office, according to Reilly. "It was so surreal to watch it,” Reilly said. “I'm not used to seeing it. You have to go back to the last governor's race to find a time when a Democrat was going after Baker as hard as they went after him yesterday.”
Reilly said that the Democrats’ tone could be an indication of deeper changes in Massachusetts politics, as Baker looks ahead to a gubernatorial race against the new backdrop of a Biden presidency and a new House speaker.
“I do think it's a long-term indicator of maybe a change coming,” Reilly said. “I think we're going to see a sustained sharper tone vis-a-vis the governor than we have up until now.”
Despite the delays and technical hiccups that have characterized the state's vaccine rollout, Baker still remains wildly popular in the state and has one of the highest approval ratings of any governor in the country. Kadzis noted that a MassINC poll from just four days ago showed Baker's approval rating holding strong at 74 percent. Nevertheless, Kadzis says Baker has a political problem on his hands, as he tries to shift the narrative away from the shaky rollout to more promising news — including that 300,000 vaccine appointments have now been booked.
“This is a problem that's not going to go away. It's a massive inconvenience [and] an anxiety-inducing inconvenience for the people who were trying to get appointments,” Kadzis said. “But from a public health point of view, as the government repeatedly pointed out, Massachusetts is one of the top in the nation in inoculating people.”
One development that could help change that narrative was the announcement yesterday that stadiums and large venues like Fenway Park and the TD Garden could go ahead with partial re-openings at the end of March.
It’s a bit of good news in a long year of bad news, and Reilly said the timing of the announcement was “effective politics.”
“From the governor's point of view, it's very artful to have people talking about, ‘hey, we're going to get to see a Red Sox game in the spring’ on the same day that you are trying to fend off unusually public and unusually sharp criticism from the people in the legislature,” Reilly said.
While there are some indications that economic recovery is picking up, Kadzis and Reilly said it’s unclear whether that will affect policy on the state level, given the uncertainty of new COVID variants spreading. The last thing Baker wants, they said, is a false reopening story.
In the meantime, Reilly is waiting for a later phase in the state's recovery to venture out with his own family. “I'm not taking the kids to any trampolining facility,” he said. “We're going to wait on that. Definitely no ball pits either.“
